Your 14 year old child/sister/brother/niece/nephew/neighbor\' kid, etc., came ac

Question

Your 14 year old child/sister/brother/niece/nephew/neighbor' kid, etc., came across this picture.

Awesome, isn't it?

It is an artwork, not a real picture, although it uses pictures of real objects. It was produced almost two decades ago as part of a public outreach campaign for one large NASA program. That project is now gone, but this illustration stayed.  It is very famous, one can find it all over the Internet.

Your kid is fascinated by it and knows that once upon a time you took a GE astronomy course.

So he or she asks you: "What do I see here?"

What do you say?

Explanation / Answer

I would say-

This is what we expect the space should look like. The sphere on the bottom right corner is our planet, the earth. This apparently large abode of everything you see is just a tiny little part of the universe. If you ever go to space you would see the dark black void space finely decorated with stars around. The collection of stars and planets forms clusters and the clusters forms the galaxies. The bright light sources that you are seeing, are nothing but the galaxies. The one you are seeing on the left side is such a spiral galaxy. The bright arms of the spiral galaxies consist of the new born hot stars and the dark parts contains the older ones. This kind of galaxies came under the 'disk galaxies'. We, our planet earth or rather I should say the solar system is part of a galaxy too, named Milky Way.

The atoms and molecules are all around the space, and the stars. Nuclear reactions are taking place in those astronomical objects.

And the overwhelming glow of colourful background is caused by the planetary nebulae. A star sometimes undergoes a phenomena towards its end of life, called 'Supernovae Explosion'. Depending on the appearance we call them by different name. One such beautiful nebulae is 'Orion nebulae'.

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